IonSense
WHAT'S NEW WITH DART® MS?                                                  October 2014  
 The Latest Developments in Direct Analysis in Real Time Mass Spectrometry 
 


CONNECT WITH US   
Join Our Mailing List
Follow us on Twitter Find us on Google+ Like us on Facebook View our videos on YouTube



We have the updated version of the DART Book of Forensics and Safety Abstracts available for downloading and there are several new publications this month.

Additionally we will be having the first DART-MS Forum on Forensics and Security January 22 in Tampa, Florida. 

 Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments.  Thanks.


Regards,

Brian Musselman, Ph.D.
President and CEO

Get the NEW DART-MS Forensics Book

 

We have just released the latest version of the DART-MS Book of Abstracts for Forensics and Security.   It has 40 examples of DART being applied to a range of problems.  Here are a few examples.
  • Pharmaceutical Identifier Confirmation 
  • DART-MS of psychoactive plant drugs
  • Adulterants in Herbal Slimming Products
  • Chemical Analysis of Synthetic Cannabinoids
  • Explosive Residue Analysis
  • Analysis of Writing Inks on Paper
  • Screening of Urine for DMAA

 

 

   

 

 

 

The First DART-MS Forum on Forensics and Security - January 22, 2015

In collaboration with the University of Tampa, we are pleased to let you know about the upcoming  DART-MS Forum on Forensics and Security.  This half-day Forum will feature leaders in the field discussing their latest advances in the areas such as pharmaceutical identification, explosives analysis, designer drugs, and new highly sensitive methods of trace analysis.

In addition we will have LIVE demonstration of DART on the MassTech MT-50 Explorer, a site-ready MS/MS instrument for rapid, simple screening of a wide range of materials and compound types.

There is no cost to attend the Forum and for those of you traveling to the Sanibel Conference, we are providing free transportation from the University of Tampa to the Sanibel meeting in Clearwater.

More details will be available shortly


 

Recent DART Publications

Detection of "Bath Salt" Synthetic Cathinones and Metabolites in Urine via DART-MS and Solid Phase Microextraction

 

 

Joseph LaPointe, Brian Musselman, Teresa O'Neill, Jason R. E. Shepard 

 

IonSense, Inc., Saugus, MA;

Department of Chemistry, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), Albany, NY  

 

A rapid and sensitive method, direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART-MS) was applied to the characterization and semiquantitative analysis of synthetic cathinones and their metabolites in urine. DART-MS was capable of detecting three different cathinones and three metabolites down to sub-clinical levels directly without any sample preparations. The process produced a spectrum within seconds because no extraction or derivatization was required for analysis and the high mass accuracy of the instrumentation allowed analysis without the need for lengthy chromatographic separations. The use of solid phase microextration demonstrated a relative increase in the detectability of both drugs and metabolites, improving the detection signal on average more than an order of magnitude over direct detection, while providing cleaner spectra devoid of the major peaks associated with urine that oftentimes dominate such samples.

 


Dania Al-Balaa, Ales Rajchl, Adéla Grégrová, Rudolf Sevčík and Helena Čízková

 

Department of Food Preservation, Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague, Czech Republic

 


To ensure that egg-containing products, such as dried eggs and egg pasta, conform to the technological and legislative requirements for egg content, methods are needed to determine the amount of cholesterol in such products. The conventional approach, direct saponification and hexane extraction followed by cholesterol determination by gas chromatography coupled to a flame ionization detector, is very time consuming. Therefore, we developed a rapid method on the basis of direct analysis in real time coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Samples were prepared simply by solvent extraction followed by extract filtration. The optimization of certain parameters, including the solvent used and direct analysis in real time ionization gas temperature, had a pronounced effect on the intensities of the produced ions, in particular, the molecular and dehydrated ions of cholesterol and its deuterated analog, cholesterol 2,2,3,4,4,6-d6, which was used as an internal standard. For the developed method, limits of detection and quantification were 0.03 and 0.05 mg/g, respectively. The results of the real samples were compared with those obtained using the conventional approach [limit of detection =0.002 mg/g and limit of quantification =0.05mg/g], and it was found that, although the results obtained using the conventional approach were more accurate, our developed method is much simpler and faster, where the time was dramatically reduced by 87% for executing a screening analysis.

Xue Li, Guangyue Hou, Junpeng Xing, Fengrui Song, Zhiqiang Liu, Shuying Liu 

  

Chemical Biology Laboratory and Changchun Center of Mass Spectrometry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130022; University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100039, China  

 

In the present work, direct analysis of real time ionization combined with multi-stage tandem mass spectrometry (DART-MSn) was used to investigate the metabolic profile of aconite alkaloids in rat intestinal bacteria. A total of 36 metabolites from three aconite alkaloids were identified by using DART-MSn, and the feasibility of quantitative analysis of these analytes was examined. Key parameters of the DART ion source, such as helium gas temperature and pressure, the source-to-MS distance, and the speed of the autosampler, were optimized to achieve high sensitivity, enhance reproducibility, and reduce the occurrence of fragmentation. The instrument analysis time for one sample can be less than 10 s for this method. Compared with ESI-MS and UPLC-MS, the DART-MS is more efficient for directly detecting metabolic samples, and has the advantage of being a simple, high-speed, high-throughput method.
About IonSense
IonSense, Inc. provides OpenSpot Mass Spectrometry™ solutions to the fields of food safety, forensics, drug development, and chemical analysis. We manufacture and develop direct analysis in real time (DART®) technology licensed from JEOL USA, Inc. and atmospheric solids analysis probe (ASAP™) licensed from M&M Consulting.

DART and ASAP Sources are available for most commercial LC/MS systems.  Look here to see if your system is DART-ready.  And  check here to see if your system is ASAP-ready.

For your local representative, please see our distributor network.

Phone - 781.484.1043  | info@ionsense.com | http://www.ionsense.com
Copyright © 2014. All Rights Reserved.